It's not intolerance we shouldn't tolerate, it's injustice. Many forms of intolerance have nothing whatsoever to do with justice : someone may refuse to watch an entire game of golf, and quite rightly so because it's feckin' dull. That intolerance isn't injustice. If they extended their own opinion of golf towards others, however, if they banned other people from watching golf because they themselves didn't enjoy it, then that's injustice. Plato's definition of justice as "minding one's own business" has some merit.
Justice and toleration are different things, though they aren't mutually exclusive. Tolerating someone's opinion is one thing, tolerating their actions quite another. Holding an opinion doesn't inflict injustice by itself, but actions (which can include, in some circumstances, the expression of that opinion) can. Tolerating injustice is to allow injustice to continue. Justice is in some cases necessarily very intolerant; in others it demands tolerance.
The intoleration of injustice can mean many things. It doesn't have to always be the extreme condition of legislation or banning. It can start with simply refusing to participate in certain actions and speaking out against them.
It's no good wailing about how people are intolerant, because intolerance isn't an evil in itself. Injustice is what you should be fighting against. Those who seek to restrict the rights of others and then claim that it's unfair that people are seeking to prevent them have missed the whole point.
Any time something is phrased in the negative, it has no definition of its own, but merely the shadow of what it opposes. But these negatives seldom form a working verb of their own, intolerate isn't really an English word, though it's acceptable as a portmanteau for the process of opposing intolerance.
ReplyDeleteToleration is passive. Opposing intolerance is active.
But injustice? Justice is law. And that word carries a mighty freight. We can say a law is unjust, on the basis of our own ethical structures - and we can change that law. But to hold up justice as an ideal can get people in trouble. It starts getting complicated. What am I defending or opposing, opposing injustice?
poemhunter.com - WH Auden
Justice and law are, like justice and toleration, neither the same nor mutually exclusive. Justice means fairness, which is a very basic ideal. Complicated ? Sometimes.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor As a parlour trick, I'd ask my children "What's Rule #1?" They'd loudly yell "Rule #1! Life is not fair!" .
ReplyDeleteFairness is a basic concept, but implementing it becomes a nightmare. Always. As an independent consultant, I pay more than twice the proportion of my income in taxes than my salaried counterparts. And that's without insurance, professional or health insurance. I've come to terms with it, I mentally work it out in my head, taxation is just a cost of doing business. But I have to call my accountant and have him look up the income tax rate for the state of Indiana, if I take a six month gig there - I pay a lot of taxes.
I could, if I were stupid, complain bitterly about my taxes, groan and mutter. Instead, I pay a first rate accountant and have a tax attorney on retainer. And I pay for them. And the money I save in taxes and the security of knowing I can survive an audit, flanked on both sides by professional fighters, is worth every penny I spend on them.
But none of this matters because I have long since worked out that socialism is the only sane framework for human society. So what? I pay a lot of taxes. I wish the USA spent my taxes more effectively and helped more people - but life isn't fair. And truth is, I've stopped hoping or wishing or expecting it to be fair. The intolerant run the world and always have.
Fairness and Justice and Tolerance and Mercy and Grace, I have the luxury of my faith, which has a truly expansive and sufficient vocabulary for all this stuff. Including Sin, which causes lots of otherwise sensible people to go running around making screechy noises.
ειδοτι ουν καλον ποιειν και μη ποιουντι αμαρτια αυτω εστιν
-he who knows the good he ought to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
Our only hope is to form societies which embody more than mere justice and tolerance, but actively holding up the weak and feeding the hungry and showing mercy to those who don't seem to deserve it, in the name of a greater good which says I ought to love my neighbour, my enemies too. And I'm not going to get that in my lifetime.
Tolerance isn't passive. Tolerance knows the world isn't fair and knows mere justice is an ugly sham, for those who can afford accountants and tax attorneys and representation at trial. The others fill the prisons and sleep in Anatole France's hotel, where both the rich and poor are invited to sleep anywhere but under bridges and beg anywhere but the streets - and particularly not to steal bread.
Dan Weese I've despised the phrase "life isn't fair" since I was a small child. It's meaningless. Of course it isn't fair - that's obvious, and why fairness gets discussed at all. It's similarly evident that its implementation is complicated, it's not a statement worth making.
ReplyDeleteAnyone worth talking to struggles to achieve fairness in spite of the knowledge that life isn't fair. That doesn't mean they hold it to be the supreme virtue or obsess with it over and above compassion or mercy or any other ideal, but the people who say, "life isn't fair" and use that as an excuse to avoid dealing with the problems (or worse, to inflict unfairness on others) - these people are are a particular kind of monster. No-one worth bothering with thinks unfairness is acceptable, but that doesn't mean they rave and rant like a lunatic at even the smallest injustice. Often, they're far more willing to accept injustice for themselves than see it done to others.
Tolerance is a pleasingly ambiguous word which can be either passive or active. One may passively tolerate and permit things which one personally doesn't approve of or simply enjoy, but one may also actively encourage the rights of others to do so. Similarly intolerance can be passive by simply not doing certain things or actively seeking to stop them happening to others. Hence I don't frame either of them in terms of activity because both can be active or passive.
Rhys Taylor I always liked Karl Popper, I was much influenced by The Open Society and Its Enemies. My take-away from Popper: I've probably said it to you before, the veneer of civilisation is very thin, and pasted onto a rotten substrate. It's always peeling up, my God, look at the rise of Donald Trump and these wicked Republicans. Society has its enemies and those who oppose them must not be shy about that opposition.
ReplyDeleteToleration is active - I wish there was another word for it, I can't think of one, some less-passive word. Something akin to the Samaritan on the road to Jericho. Greek has a great word, ἐσπλαγχνίσθη , moved with compassion, literally from σπλάγχνα the word for guts, intestines. We sorta hear it in the phrase "In my guts..." We see injustice in the world, we react to it and are moved with compassion to do something, or we suppress that reaction and allow evil to triumph.
Dan Weese I have to disagree. Toleration can be active : you can actively choose to support a position, or encourage behaviours (that's a bit stronger than "toleration" though, I think)... or you can merely allow it in the sense of not venturing an opinion on a subject at all. That's active in the technical sense of having made the choice not to actively oppose, but in practical terms it's passive. Toleration might also be fairly described as not being aware there's a choice to be made, e.g. simple unquestioning acceptance.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor Exactly. Toleration can't be merely passive. Passivity tolerates the intolerable. Passivity is the triumph of evil.
ReplyDeleteSome years ago, a bit of background, I met my g/f on the Internet, she came down to visit me, we had a grand time, driving around the country. Then I came north to meet her family, most of whom are Republicans, I'd heard.
So I finally get to meet them all at some birthday party, one of more obstreperous of them asked about my politics - in the presence of all the others. I said: "I take my politics too seriously to argue about it. Nobody's politics is shaped by high ideals. Everyone is the sum of all they've done and all the dings and slights and injustice they've seen and endured in the world. That's why we're all so different.
"Me, I'm a liberal, that's what life has made of me. I measure society from the ground up, from what happens to the poor and the disenfranchised and the refugees and the sick and the children and women and the hated.
"But that doesn't mean someone can't be an honest conservative, if your experience has been with heartless government that doesn't respect you and pushes you around, that would make anyone reject all these government solutions to the world's problems. Not every problem can be legislated away with the stroke of a pen.
"Decent people can have different opinions. That's entirely necessary in a free society. I like all of you, you've been kind to me, a stranger among you - I won't disagree with your opinions."
But my g/f, she's a great arguer, gets into these heated discussions with people. It was a hell of a relationship at the beginning, we're so completely different. She'd never met anyone willing to hear both sides of an argument, I guess. Popper makes the point about how observation is always selective, gummed up with prior theory, how inductive logic is essentially impossible. Science is about problem solving, not so much about theory building. Science, according to Popper, is rather like Sherlock Holmes: mostly about carving off all the impossible bits, leaving only the possible.
Dan Weese
ReplyDeleteToleration can't be merely passive. Passivity tolerates the intolerable. Passivity is the triumph of evil.
I dunno, they're somewhat interchangeable in my mind. Passivity, like toleration, could also apply to things which one merely doesn't like. I wouldn't define either of them to specifically only relate to unfair actions. They can be equally applied to things which are morally neutral, in my view.
Still, regardless of what terms we use, the various states I'd group as something like this :
- Not being conscious of how things are - the extreme form of passivity. Arguably distinct from toleration because one isn't aware there's a choice.
- Being aware that things could be different, but not choosing to act for change.
- Being aware of the choice and actively deciding to do something about it.
One can be actively against something whilst still being tolerant towards the actual people who participate in it, however.